Three performances of Frame Dances down, five to go! Tonight's two performances were as different as could be. I exaggerate, but they were different, and it had nothing to do with us performers. It was the audience. The 6:30 audience were very somber; someone said they were afraid to laugh (there are comic bits). The dancers felt very isolated, the audience very distant. This made the whole thing seem quite oppressive somehow, like some kind of vaguely cruel human experimentation. The 9:30 audience was looser (also a bit smaller), and it felt more like we were sharing the experience with them. But we performers were also more aware of being there for each other, our interactions in "Green, green grass" smoother and more clearly a work of collaboration.
Don't ask about my few seconds in the frame; that's not what this is about. What it's about - what I'm getting from this experience - is an inside taste of being part of a company of performers doing the same thing many times, something rare enough in the arts but unthinkable in the academy. I opined at length in Religion & Theater last month about how the shared repeated experience of the same performance allowed of an awareness of the vast possibilities available within a fixed script or form, of the room for play and contingency and consequently how no performance is like any other precisely because of the unchanging framework - things my reading had suggested were points in common between liturgies and theatrical performances. Some students thought these superficial if not misguided parallels; and in truth didn't know what I was talking about. I could only imagine, aware of romanticizing it, what it would be like to be operating within an entirely predefined script, liberated from the need to be "creative" in a vacuum and freed to be responsible and responsive to a context, a project, a collaborator, a moment. Now, thanks to Susan Marshall, I'm getting at least a little smidgen of first hand experience of this! (I can also already taste the sadness which will come when our run ends, sadness not only at the end of what we've shared, but of being part of an ongoing open-ended work of shared creation.)
And so, you see, this isn't just Mark up to his usual digressive oddball tricks. It's research!
